The Blood: A Denouement

This land is no man’s land, a place where it is easy to be lost. There was no greater predator than the white one, and all who wished to escape him fled into these marshes, into these islands which disappear and reappear, connect and disconnect. When the English, both greedy and lazy came, all along the Carolina and the Georgia coasts, they settled their few cities but believed that death lay in the marshes and low country. Plantations they established, but they left them to Africans they had enslaved. Now and again the white men came to reassert their dominance, and this always resulted in trouble.

History is written by white men and their disgraceful deeds they have washed away, and so most of their relationships with us were washed away too. Alongside those deeds, the defeats they suffered at our hands are forgotten as well, and so the blood of the English that was spilled in these lands, the uprisings of Black men, have long been put out of mind.

In the days when George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were fretting about their slavery to England while putting a lash to the backs of the Negroes who made them money, the Harrowing of the Dark and Light occurred. It was called this because many people fled to the wet lands and the hidden lands for peace, Indians and white men, white men who were pirates, and Negroes as well, and in those days, the white families at the heads of the plantations became too much to take and so, behind one called the Black Witch, the Negroes, the pirates, the poor white men, the Indians all rose. They slaughtered all the planting white families. They killed, it is said, three hundred and seventeen Anglo souls.

In 1803 at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, Glynn County, on the coast of Georgia there was grounded a slave ship called the Wanderer filled with Igbo and other West African captives from what is now Nigeria who were taken to the Georgia coast. In May 1803, the Igbo and other West African captives arrived in Savannah, Georgia, on the slave ship the Wanderer. They were purchased for an average of $100 each by slave merchants John Couper and Thomas Spalding to be resold to plantations on nearby St. Simons Island. The chained Igbo were packed under deck of a coastal vessel, the York, which would take them to St. Simons.

But the flying folk kept their power, although they shed their wings. All the time they were on that ship they all felt the ship’s chains. That very day, the King of the Igbo declared, "The time is come." He raised his arms out to the others. And he sighed the ancient words that were a dark promise. He said them all around to the others in the field under the whip, "...kum yali... kum tambe...." He raised his hands and sang to Ala and Amadioha, Ikenga God of Strength, Idemmili, Ogbunabali, and especially Legba, who conceals.

They gave a great outcry. The Igbo straightened their bent backs and stood like spears. And so, when their King called for them to do so, they rebelled, approximately 75 Igbo. They took control of the ship and drowned their captors, but they were not sailors, so it was in that process the ship was grounded in Dunbar Creek.

One by one, they marched from the ship and leapt into the water, coming to shore and disappearing into the marshes. They traveled by day and slept in the night, and on their travels they met other Negroes, Indians as well, and heard, for the first time, of the Black Witch of Dark and Light.

In the deep night, when they all slept but for the King, he raised up a great searching enchantment, therby calling upon the Black Witch of the Marshlands. In the morning, the whole of the King’s people gave a great outcry and flew through the marshes and the trees searching for him. to the Black Witch

As night approached, they came upon the Black Witch’s Domain. He was dark as night, but his bride was white as the moon. The Black Witch joined these new black men with his tribe. This tribe had taken their name from the Harrowing of the Black and the White, for when darkness and light combine, is it is often called Dun, and so the Witch called his family the Dunharrow. The head of the Dunharrows was called, as you have guessed, Augustus, and that Igbo king was Niwalla. Niwalla’s daughter married the son of Augustus’s brother, Octavian, and from from them come most of the Dunharrow family, even you.

And so, the Negroes could fly. White men, lazy and murderous as they were, did not understand the marshes and feared them anyway, while the Africans understood the heat and the land very well, so when white men dared the marshes to drag back the Igbo, the ones Niwalla could not kill, he did, and the spells he could not make, Augustus raised, so that the white men who rarely came into these lands, in time, could not even find them.

Part Four

Becoming

Twelve

Becoming

A feast every day in your hearts in the joy of my rapture!

-The Book of the Law

He stood in the grass waiting for him. How long ago was it that first time he had found him in the woods, chased by white men, and he had…. Saved him? Even now it was hard to believe he had saved Malachy, hard to believe that someone else or something else would not have come along, harkening to his call. Back then he had been on his way to rescue his nephews from Long Lees, now Long Lees was gone, or rather the family that had ruled it was gone. That was twenty years and more now, but as the shiny black ssedan came up the road and stopped before Christopher, he marveled once again and how little the passage of them meant.

The man inside the coach was all in burgundy and black velvet againt his caramel skin, and he sproted a high, plush burgundy top hat over his high collar. He gave Christopher a predatory smile which made him wonder just who was the blood drinker.

“You look magnificent,” Malacky told him.

Chris was in royal blue waistcoat and doffed, playfully a royal blue top hat that made his pale hair gleam even more platinium. He held the sun well. He always had since those long ago days in the islands, and his skin glowed copper and healthy, his blue eyes full of life like the sea.

“How was the family you did not wish to introduce me to?” Chris asked.

Malachy did not rise to the bait, but simply said, “I think I’ve seen them for the last time.”

Chris raised an eyebrow.

“There’s only so much we should know about each other. It is seldom all the different creatures of this world meet and Augustus is the only one who knows about you or the existence of other drinkers. The family is in good hands under he and Octavian. It’s time for me to disappear again. I have chosen the nezt to come after me. When its his time, he will know.

“His time?” Chris said.

“This was a great discomfort they danced around. When Chris saw Malachy, unchanged after so many years, he could tell himself that it hardly mattered that Malachy was mortal. Apparently some witches had lives so long they could just keep going forever, but Malachy pointed out:

“To my knowledge there had never been a witch that did that.

What’s more, he didn’t intend to.

He was riding away, riding off to Chris’s world and leaving the Dunharrows, and the two of them would live in that world until… until Malachy ceased to live at all. Or until, one night, he became what Chris was.

“I’m a witch,” Malachy had said, once, “not a drinker.”

“You could be both.”

“Maybe someone could,” Malachy said. “But not me.”

“And then where did we go? Did we go to your castle?”

“Not yet. We went to Ohio.”

“Yes…. I almost remember it.”

“I almost forgot it.”

“I think you were meant to.”

In the early morning, Lewis stretches out naked on the bed and luxuriates in being stroked like a cat, but now he turns on his back so he can look up and see, looking like white marble and white gold fineness, Chris Ashby, reclined on his shoulder, looking down on him.

“I think there was some sort of enchantment upon it,” Chris said, “Or else we would have known about it. We were taking it somewhere. On the way to the castle, we were taking it somewhere?”

“And you don’t even remember this?”

It had started as a reminiscence. And now Lewis realized the memory had something to do with what was happening now.

“All I can remember is that I was glad to take you home,” Chris said.

“I wonder if that was an enchantment as well,” Lewis said, pulling his legs under him to sit up right and stroking his chin.

“I don’t like having something in my mind that leaves this much of a blank,” Chris said.

Lewis could remember, if he tried, though remembering things from lives past was more of an effort than he generally wished to employ. Lewis Dunahrrow was a pragmatist, and what mattered was the moment, or if not the moment, then the last forty years of this particular life. The only reason he plunged into the past was because Christopher was there, and he longed for Lewis to share the memory. And of course it made sense, the one whom you had loved, who promised to return, had been gone from you for… Lewis shied from counting the number of years, and rested at, a few human lifetimes, and then he had come back. How could you not wish for him to remember the past, and the truth was, once Lewis set his mind to it, those memories came quite easily.

“But not this one,” Lewis said.

They had been traveling to Europ,e but on their way they had stopped in Ohio. They had gotten something, and taken it with them, and left it with people, but the more Lewis tried to remember, the more memory resisted him.

“I must have put a strong enchantment upon it,” he said at last.

“You think it was you?” Chris asked.

“Is it more like that it was me, or that is was a wizard of greater powers whom we haven’t met yet?”

“Well, when you put it that way…” Chris said.

“But then, if you put an enchantment or… the whole incident. Can’t you take it off.”

“Quite possibly it was never meant to be taken off,” was all Lewis said.

He was done with it that tone of voice said, and Chris was done with the business too. Having been around so incredibly long he realized it was best to leave some mysteries as mysteries.

But how could they look at the past effectively when they could barely remember the present. After all, it had not been long at all since Lewis had come into that world. Perhaps, in the back of his mind, Chris had imagined finding someone and brining them home that night, but certainly Lewis, tired and feeling middle aged, dragged out by an old friend who was around and present as often as she was not, had not intended on even meeting someone. And then they were talking in that bar, that club, next to that friend, and all three seemed like distraction.

They had walked till they reached the beach and only the sounds of the water were their company, and it must have been then that Lewis invited him, and Chris followed. All the way back on the rattling, fluorescent train, Chris Ashby had felt something more important than lust, peace. A simple feeling that somehow, with this man he had just met, he was going home.He refused to examine that feeling, some things fell apart in examination.

He remembered once, several times, being with men he didn’t like at all who tried various clumsy ways to arouse him while he never tried to accommodate their need. They thought everything was about lust. People thought this was new, but the world has always believed this, boys selling themselves on the streets of nineteenth century towns had believed this as well as sad men now. But it had been in that little apartment that the truth of things revealed itself. He loved being in Lewis’s presence. He could have sat across a chair from him all night, and what called itself lust was unfolding. All of his unfolded, his penis stretched out and filled in the presence of this man. Even while he sat, looking gentle faced while they talked, that part of him that bore some of his sould aimed straight for Lewis and, at last, Lewis came to kiss him, and then, at last, Lewis was on the bed with him, and the knelt before each other, and Lewis held Chris in his hand, methodically rubbing his penis with oil, watching it grow while he gently caressed the shaft, thumbed the glowing head. Chris, mouth open and almost shy, did not look him in the eye while he swayed to the pleasure of those hands.

Lewis brought Chris down, and opened his thighs. Chris pushed his knees up a little but only a little, and with a groan of half surprise they worked their bodies together so that Chris’s penis pushed inside Lewis. Silently they worked like that, Lewis’s hands in Chris’s white gold hair. Chris’s face in his shoulder. They kissed and then Lewis disengaged, laying Chris on his back, and descending on him, riding him under the amber fairy lights before at last, he lay on his stomach and brought Chris into him, murmuring, “Fuck me, Chris Ashby. Don’t be gentle.”

And Chris obeyed, fucking him steadily, until his hands were clasped in Chris’s and Chris’s face was pressed against his. As the tiny amber lights strung about the room winked on and waned and winked on again, and the great window let in the blind night, quietly the two of them strived together in grunts and small swears, and the attic room bore the sounds of bodies slapping, mouths opening in the joy of release until, at last, with a low groan Chris’s hands clinched tighter on Lewis’s while he came. It was only a little longer when Lewis, who thought he was too tired, too worn out for it, too still filled with Chris’s fucking, surprised himself with an orgasm high as the Alps and delicate as the shattering of glass, and it was still only a few minutes later when his hand reached up to turn out the lamp and cover the room in darkness while the two of them slept in each other’s arms.

At that time, Lewis reflected, while he lay in Chris Ashby’s arms at Long Lees, he had known nothing at all of this man. It was in waking the next morning, or perhaps in the short hours of the rest of the night, that they both began to know things about each other. Suspect was not even the right word. Then, as now, in the dark they made the various forms of love and somehow in the morning light Chris not only knew what Lewis was, but remembered who.

How then had Lewis, who knew nothing of blood drinkers or werewolves or much of anything outside the human had known exactly what Chris was? How buy by some buried memory, released by his kiss, his hands, his entry, so like the passion they had known in that stone castle long ago.

When Lewis had been introduced to Kruinh as a vampire king, he had not fully understood the matter. When he had learned than Dan was his lieutenant, he had thought this was a nice title to give a nice boy accidently turned into a blood drinker. It was only in the course of talking to Chris that he learned that unlike a human kingdom, all contained one space, the kingdoms and even empires of drinkers consisted of castles, fortresses, companies now, towns and cities dotted all about the world in weblike networks, that far beyond the house on Brummel Street, there were several drinker ad mortal a like, who bowed the knee to Kruinh.

“And what of Sunny… when you said he was a Prince?”

“He is Kruinh’s Prince.”

“And Laurie?”

“A General. You know he was a soldier, and you know there have been wars between Blood clans. Why, Sunny was almost killed in one.”

“And you?” Lewis had asked.

“I am a janitor at Wilson College.”

While he was talking, Chris’s voice had changed, not the American accent he could not quite place, or the heavy northern English one that sounds so strange out of his mouth, but something grand and slow and Lewis said, “If you don’t wish to tell me, that is fine.”

Sitting naked beside him, his white blond hair sticking up, Chris took out a cigarette and lit it. A gust of grey smoke left his nostrils and went past Lewis’s eyes.

“If you can remember it,” Chris said, inhaling again, “I won’t have to tell you.”

He remembered the long lancet windows shining in the morning, so difference from any American elegance he had yet seen. Peaked roves, slate tiles, the grey stone trim on the walls against the white façade, turrets bearing turrets and the thick green forest surrounding the valley bowl.

“Chaperon,” Lewis’s name fell on the old house, palace really.

Chaperon of the bridge crossing the swift blue river and the great dancing hall. Chaperon of the village where the daub on the houses was white and the thatch golden like in the stories. Chaperon ringed about from the rest of the world so that even the Terror at the end of the century never touched.

“Chaperon, where I lived,” Lewis said.

“And where you died,” Chris thought of stopping himself from saying, but then said so anyway.

“You were the Grand Duke. You are the Grand Duke,” Lewis said.

Then he said, “I make you wait for me, but I always come back. I know you wonder if the time will come when I will ask you to make you as you are.”

“It has not happened yet,” Chris said. “Maybe this time I will make myself as you are.”

“What?”

“Leave this world with you next time.”

“If you leave it, I am not sure you have the option of coming back.”

“Would you come back? If I died with you this time?”

They lay, too drowsy for this talk, in each other’s arms, Lewis stroking Chris’s skin.

“It is a discussion that surely must come,” Lewis said. “But for now let us think on lighter things.”